For those of you living under a rock, MAME is the Multiple Machine Arcade Emulator, the de facto, gold-standard for playing classic arcade games. While the initial port runs slowly, I’m sure optimizations will be done over time to let the iPhone play your arcade favorites at a reasonably accurate speed. The developer claims that some simpler games like Pac-man and Q*bert run at close to normal speeds, while many games don’t perform so well yet, even with frame-skipping on and sound disabled.

As is the case with all homebrew iPhone applications, you’ll have to do a bit of work to get it up and running on your phone. For those of you who know your way around a compiler, you can pick up the full source code and read more about the emulator over on Google Code.

[via MAKE]